Article prepared by CWEP
Fake news spread in the mass media rapidly. There are many reasons why it happens. Sometimes it is just a matter of hurry – a journalist who has not enough time can not check all of the information properly before publishing them. However, very often fake news are spreaded on purpose by someone who wants to achieve some goal by doing this. In any of those cases we should be able to verify if a news is true or fake.
Why fake news can be dangerous?
Many decisions made in our life are based on what we read or heard in media. We create our point of view on many political, social and economical matters using those news as a base of our conclusions. For example when it comes to voting on presidential election many people will reject candidate who is part of some scandalous incident described in news papers. The same will happen if some institution, e.g. specific bank will be presented in media as colaborating with criminals. It can loose many customers just because of this simple information. What if it is not true? In this moment both – reader/viewer and the described person/institution are victims of fake news and get the impact of the message which it brings. If the result can be so serious, we should know how to check if the news is true or fake.
Check – Who? What? When? Where?
The first action which all of us should do is to check the source of the information and the author who prepared the news. If there are some spelling errors in company names, or strange-sounding extensions like “.infonet” and “.offer,” instead of the traditional „.com” that should concers us.
If the website exists for a short period of time, most of the articles are written by the same authors and the articles have the same context, e. g. political, where a person or a political party is presented in very negative way those are the signs that this website is not trustworthy.
Check also if any other websites report the same story. If yes read it and compare to the one you saw at the beginning. You may find some differences inside. If yes try to look for more websites or channels presenting this news. If most of them wrote the same version of the story – that is the sign that it’s the most trustworthy version.
Apart from that you should check the author of this news by researching his name, position, career path and other news he/she wrote. Look for any information about his/her reputation and professional career.
Numbers, dates, names, FACTS!
The real story is always based on many facts. Those are dates, numbers, statistics and also quotes from experts or eye-witnesses. More facts the author brings – more authentic the story seems to be. Check if the article you read has those information. If they are missing you should ask a question „why?” The facts should be placed inside the text to prove the truth of the story described in the news, shouldn’t they?
What do others think?
If you are not sure if the news is true or not, scroll the website down and read the comments of other people. Maybe there are some who have a knowledge about the topic of the news? Maybe they know some facts which are different than those described there? Suggestions given by other people can point some other sources of information which can be really helpful and reveal the fake news.
Catchy for the eye
All fake news are made in one purpose – to achieve the desired mood and emotions of the receiver. The fake news author will try to use all possible resources of the article which are possible to do that. Those are: pictures, photos and headlines.
Look deeply on all of those components and think if the headline attacks a person described in the article, brings some negative connotations and associations or leaves misunderstandings. If yes, be careful! It might be written to create a desired perspective in your mind at the very beginning of the news.
The pictures and photos used in an article are also very important. They can be modified or made in the way which keeps you thinking that the things described in the news are true. Look at them carefully. Sometimes they can be edited and changed or sometimes only a piece of original picture can be presented in the news what will totally change its whole context. You can use a service such as TinEye to conduct a reverse image search. Thanks to that you will be able to find out where the image appears on the web and it will indicate if it was modified or not.
As you can see there are many different ways to find out if the news is true or fake. You may do a research to find more information about this topic. Since now start to read and watch each news with open mind and verify with the methods you know if the author wants to catch you in a disinformation trap prepared by him.